Reading about scala I could only be curious about it, went to read details about the language and how it works. I get the idea that this is happening:

PHP is moving in the Java style direction… (Not trying to compare anything.)

Java is moving into a simpler coding Groovy, Scala ( in some cases harder) has Gosling him self professed. Both languages are being used in the financial markets( scala 1, scala 2, scala 3, Groovy ) for trading algorithms and social network Twitter , LinkedIn, it is said that Actors in Scala are a great way for Async communication Akka.Actors is said to be even better. Would like to have seen this two years ago, could have used this instead of Perl for a daemon I wrote. Both Scala and Groovy can use imported Java code.